Monday, July 4, 2011

Where do you find good off-line customers?

All right, now on to step two which is, a lot of people don't talk about so much, is actually choosing your target, you know. Where do you find good off-line customers? Now, a place that I found to be very helpful to me is group listings, you know, the Chamber of Commerce and a lot of people are hesitant, you know, "I don't want to pay the money," and "I don't want to join." Well, the chamber is a very tightknit community and once you become a member it's almost, I don't want to use the word 'cult' because it's kind of crazy but, they rely on each other and they'll tend to say, "Okay, you're a chamber member. I trust you more automatically because you're a chamber member." It's kind of weird. It's like being in a family. Like it's a family member recommends, you know, "Hey, Keith. You should go to this restaurant." You're like, "Oh, yeah, okay." So, you're going to trust the opinion and the chamber because they're a community. They're tightknit community and if you say, "Yeah, I'm a chamber member," and you go to another chamber member the trust is different because you've been elevated to a different status. So, joining one of those groups is definitely a good way as well to get into different communities. You can get presentations, you can do all sorts of different things. We're not going to focus on that, I'm just trying to give you an idea of areas to look at to get ideas for potential customers. Now, another huge area that a lot of people neglect is paid advertising. Look at your physical Yellow Pages, you know, pull it out and look at that big brick that usually ends up sitting on people's porch forever.

I mean those people are paying money to have that ad in there, physically paying money to put their ad in it. A tactic, a technique that's just growing old, people don't usually use it but, yet they're still paying. These books are still really pretty thick and they're investing money in this so, it shows that they're serious that they want to invest so, that's a good thing. They're willing to spend money on advertising. Same thing with the Yellow Pages online, people are spending money there to. Newspaper ads, you know, we see newspapers going out of business everyday yet people are still buying these ads. That tells me, hey they have money for advertising, you know. I'm not going to go to try to convince them they need to advertise. They know they need to advertise.

They're putting their thing on the paper so, if I can show them how using online tactics is going to be a lot more efficient and cost-effective for them, I can quickly convert them over to a marketing customer. TV ads, radio ads, all the same stuff. They all apply. Billboards, you know, because people are spending money. Billboards, they spend a lot of money and a lot of times it's just for branding, you know, that they're really not getting a lot of customers off of that. And another one that people neglect, and it's actually probably one of the best places to look, is PPC or pay per click ads. So, if I go online and I type, you know, 'chiropractor Fort Lauderdale' and I see my standard listings come up and then I see all the pay per click ads well, those pay per click ads are telling me that those chiropractors are smart enough to realize that the best way to advertise is on Google, is on the Internet, and they're actually paying money for pay per click which actually pay per click usually gets about 25% of the traffic that the natural search results get. So, an easy pitch to them would be, I would find out where their website was, you know, I'd find somebody that's paying to be on page one for pay per click, find out where they're actually listed for their company for, you know, 'chiropractor Fort Lauderdale', maybe they're on page 2, 3 or 4, and then show them the traffic difference.